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The Dynamics of Women's Representation in the Canadian Provinces: 1975–1994*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Donley T. Studlar  and
Richard E. Matland
Donley T. Studlar
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
Richard E. Matland
Affiliation:
University of Houston
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Abstract

This article presents evidence concerning women's representation in Canada's provincial legislative assemblies over a 20-year period (1975–1994). Data from 3,755 elections and over 11,000 candidates are analyzed to inspect trends in representation. The authors find there has been a gradual increase in both female candidates and legislators. The New Democratic party has clearly been the leader in putting women on the ballot and into legislatures at the provincial level. In addition, hypotheses are tested to see if there are differences across provinces in parties' willingness to nominate and elect women, and whether women are more likely to be nominated primarily in districts where a party does not expect to win. The study finds that the Atlantic provinces lagged behind the rest of Canada as representation increased markedly everywhere else in the late 1980s and the 1990s. There is also evidence that the major parties nominated female challengers in ridings that were inferior to the ridings where the party's male challengers ran in the mid- to late-1970s. By the mid-1980s, however, evidence that women were treated as sacrificial lambs had disappeared.

Résumé

Cette élude fait le bilan de la représentation des femmes dans les assemblées législatives provinciales au Canada lors de 20 années (1975–1994). Les données visant 3755 élections et plus de 11 000 candidats ont été analysées afin de cerner les principales tendances quant à la représentation des femmes durant cette période. Les résultats démontrent une augmentation progressive du nombre de candidates et de législatrices. Il est clair qu'à l'échelle provinciale le Nouveau parti démocratique est celui qui a présenté le plus de femmes aux élections et promu le plus de candidatures féminines aux fonctions législatives. On évalue également des hypothèses relatives au comportement respectif des provinces quant vient le temps de présenter et d'élire des femmes. Les résultats de cette étude démontrent que les provinces maritimes traînent la patte par rapport aux autres assemblées provinciales où la représentation des femmes a augmenté sensiblement à la fin des années quatre-vingt et dans les années quatre-vingt-dix. Il est également clair que durant la deuxième moitié des années soixante-dix tous les principaux partis ont placé leurs candidates dans des circonscriptions plus difficiles que celles de leurs collègues masculins. Cependant, dès la mi des années quatre-vingt, les femmes cessaient d'être sacrifiées lors d'élections perdues à l'avance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 269 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1996

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References

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11 Darcy, Welch and Clark, Women, Elections and Representation, chaps. 2 and 3.

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14 Ibid.; and Harder, “Career Patterns.”

15 One of the explanations for the decreasing representation of women in higher levels in other countries is that power increases, and therefore the competition for office becomes much stiffer. But in Canada, federal/provincial power differentials are not that great; therefore there may be little difference in competition across levels.

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23 Studlar and Matland, “The Growth of Women's Representation”; and Pelletier and Tremblay, “Les femmes sont-elles candidates dans des circonscriptions perdues d'avance?”

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27 Dyck, Provincial Politics in Canada, 6; S. J. R. Noel, “Leadership and Clientelism,” in Bellamy, David J., Pammett, Jon H. and Rowat, Donald C., eds., The Provincial Political Systems: Comparative Essays (Toronto: Methuen, 1976), 197–213Google Scholar; Stewart, Ian, Roasting Chestnuts: The Myth of Maritime Political Culture (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994Google Scholar), chap. 5; and Adamson, Agar and Stewart, Ian, “Party Politics in Atlantic Canada: Still the Mysterious East?” in Thorburn, Hugh G., ed., Party Politics in Transition (6th ed.; Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1991), 507–21.Google Scholar

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30 In any given year, only a few provinces hold elections. In some years there is only one or no provincial election. The three-year rolling averages give a better idea of general trends since they encompass elections in six to nine provinces (see Appendix for details). Three-year averages, however, do not encompass all provinces since some will only have elections every fourth or fifth year. Other provinces can have more than one election within a three-year period. While individual year data are only presented from 1975 forward, data from 1973 and 1974 have been used in calculations of the 1975 and 1976 three-year averages.

31 Matland, Richard E. and Studlar, Donley T., “The Contagion of Women Candidates in Single-Member District and Proportional Representation Electoral Systems: Canada and Norway,” Journal of Politics 58 (1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar), forthcoming.

32 Data on regional and minor parties, principally Social Credit in British Columbia and the Parti Québécois in Quebec, are not presented in the tables for reasons of space. Full results are available from the authors on request.

33 These numbers do not include all candidates for other parties. We only considered candidates for other parties who polled at least 5 per cent of the vote in the riding.

34 In the 20-year period being considered, there were 47 provincial elections and only 31 independent and other party representatives elected. This is less than one representative per election. We believe the data are too weak to be able to say anything meaningful about these cases.

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38 The data were pooled into distinct time periods in order not to bias the results regionally, depending on which provinces held elections in any particular year. In creating the time blocks the desire to include all provinces in a block was balanced against the desire to have the time periods be relatively short so it would be reasonable to assume they are part of the same “era.” Several variations in groupings were tried, and they do not significantly affect the results reported.

39 The Liberal party is close to showing a pattern of bias in the mid-1970s, too. The difference of means test for the 1975–1978 period is statistically significant at the .11 level. If the 1975–1982 periods are pooled, the test shows a statistically significant difference in the probability that a female non-incumbent would win for the Liberal party.

40 There is one possible exception to this. As Pelletier and Tremblay found (“Les femmes sont-elles candidates dans des circonscriptions perdues d'avance?”), our general result is one of no discrimination. Like Pelletier and Tremblay, however, we find that in the 1981 Quebec election there was some evidence (in our case, almost reaching statistical significance at the .05 level) that the PQ did not provide women with their fair share of winnable seats. This result, however, is both an anomaly in the party's record and a finding that does not stand up to robust statistical testing (if one more PQ woman would have won, the difference would be nowhere near significant).

41 The period 1983–1986 represents an interesting one. In Table 4 the gap between successful male and female non-incumbents is sufficiently small that it is not statistically significant for any party. Yet there is a clear gap in successor candidates for those years, which seems to indicate that, for this test, this period is more appropriately grouped with the earlier period than with the later one.

42 Consistent with the findings in Table 4, neither the PQ nor Social Credit show any systematic bias in terms of type of riding or in quality of riding within the various categories for any period.

43 For the Liberals and the NDP within this category, variance is fairly limited; men and women tend to do just about as well when compared in the same type of riding (successor, open seat or opposing an incumbent). The one exception to this is Liberal candidates in the 1975–1978 period, where women ran in substantially weaker ridings when running against incumbents or in open seats.

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46 Bashevkin, “Building a Political Voice.”

47 As one of the anonomyous reviewers for the Journal correctly pointed out, there is some danger of this argument falling prey to an ecological fallacy. While women as a whole have lower levels of education, income and professional employment, at the level of the nomination meetings it is entirely possible to have individual women candidates who score as high as any male candidate on all of these characteristics.

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49 One explanation for the relatively equal levels of representation at the national and subnational level, although intuitively appealing, can be ruled out. Ontario and Quebec together account for almost 60 per cent of the federal MPs, and for only 35 per cent of the provincial legislators. If women were better represented in these largest and most urban provinces, then the difference in weighting between the federal and provincial levels might explain why provincial representation has tended to lag, or at best equal, federal representation. While plausible, when we modeled provincial representation of the nation as a whole so that Quebec and Ontario contributed the same percentage to provincial MLAs as they do to the federal House of Commons, we find this does not result in major changes in women's representation. Although there would usually be a few more women, overall representation among provincial MLAs would basically follow the same contours as the actual growth of provincial representation.

50 Burt, Sandra, “Women's Issues and the Women's Movement in Canada since 1970,” in Cairns, Alan and Williams, Cynthia, eds., The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Language in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 111–69.Google Scholar

51 There were more geniune federal three-party contests than provincial; such con-tests are, ipso facto, more unpredictable for parties. The votes of women, or indeed any undecided group, are more coveted in such a party system. Most provincial seats, and indeed most provincial party systems as a whole, tend to be two-party competitive. See Dyck, Provincial Politics in Canada, 628–30.

52 Bashevkin, “Building a Political Voice.”